Resource Review: Basic Latin Dictionaries

May 5, 2010

I spent some time discussing the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae the other week; now I want to cover the most commonly used latin dictionaries, the ones that undergraduate students are likely to own personally or consult online.

The standard latin dictionary for 100 years was Lewis and Short, A Latin Dictionary (Oxford 1879). (My mother has a copy that was her grandfather’s when he was in graduate school; he had a PhD in philosophy from Chicago and taught at St. John’s College in Annapolis. My family history is littered with Classics scholars. But I digress.) Jenkins (no. 510) says it “is based on antiquated principles and obsolete editions; it also contains many errors.” It is, as Jenkins notes, still widely used, and its availability online at Perseus must make its use extra tempting for many students! The UGA Library owns it in print and there are several copies of various printings in the Alexander Room in Classics.

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[…] 2010 This post is a bit of a catch-all, following the more detailed discussions of TLL and the standard latin dictionaries, dealing with what Jenkins recommends and what we own at UGA, especially in Main […]